SAN FRANCISCO  Bob Stern leans forward in his leather office chair, gazes into the camera and explains in a steady voice why in just a few hours he will kill himself.

Stern is taping a video message from his central California ranch for his two grown daughters; his wife and grown son watch helplessly as he explains his plans as rationally and calmly as if it were just another business decision.

"I'm trying to make a judgment as to what to do," says Stern, a lifelong entrepreneur. "I am 77 years old. I still have my sanity and my reasoning capability. I have been reasonably financially successful in this world, using my smarts, very thoroughly learning and analyzing a particular situation and using the cost/benefit ratio. And where the benefit far exceeds the cost, then I go for the deal."

The risks that his health will fail are too great. Given the circumstances, he concludes that ending his life is the only rational choice.

He will not have surgery scheduled the next day for an aortic aneurysm. Doctors have predicted a good outcome. But Stern, who has a history of stroke and heart disease and also has untreated prostate cancer, believes that the risk is too great. He fears that surgery will result in complications that will make him less than the man he wants to be for the remainder of his days.

Before sunrise the next day, July 5, 2001, he walks out of his home to the gates of his ranch and shoots himself in the head.

A 'self-made death'

One of his daughters, filmmaker Susan Stern, has used her father's home video to make a documentary called The Self-Made Man about his life — and especially his death.

"If we celebrate the self-made man, can we celebrate the self-made death?" asks Stern, 51, of San Francisco.

An intensely personal, emotionally charged exploration of her family and her father's decision to end his life, the one-hour documentary airs tonight on P.O.V. (PBS, 10 ET/PT, times may vary). It opens a window on one of the most sensitive debates in America today: whether people have the right to end their own lives.

The film explores not only the question of whether Bob Stern's suicide was, as he believed, rational, but it also raises a larger question: Can suicide ever really be rational?

Some say it can — if people are free of mental illness and especially if they have a debilitating, life-threatening condition.

"I believe everybody has the right to end their life if they wish," says Derek Humphry, 75, who founded the now-defunct Hemlock Society 20 years ago and wrote the controversial book Final Exit, which instructs people how to kill themselves. "I believe in rational suicide, and I always have."

He defines rational suicide as "competent adults realizing that their condition is no longer worth living with."

Some psychologists agree. "It is possible for people to make well-reasoned decisions that death is their best option," says James Werth, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Akron and author of several books about end-of-life questions, including rational suicide. But those cases are fairly rare, he says, and he adds that people should be evaluated by professionals to make sure they cannot be helped otherwise.

On the other side are those who say suicide is morally wrong and those who say it is, by definition, an irrational act. Many in the prevention field say that even when a person appears rational, often he or she is experiencing a mental illness, such as depression.

Worrisome factors

"I believe that there are people who want to commit suicide for a variety of reasons — and I can understand why they did it or attempted it," says Donna Cohen, a professor in the department of aging and mental health at the University of South Florida.

But, she adds, "I have not seen in my 30 years of research, clinical or educational experience, something that I consider a rational suicide. I know people who have made a decision to end their lives, and I have always seen there was something coloring that decision."

Some worry that declaring some suicides rational will feed prejudices against people with disabilities.

"Anybody who wants to kill themselves, by definition, is saying their life has no value to them," says Stephen Drake, research analyst for Not Dead Yet, a disability rights organization opposed to assisted suicide. "If we are saying they are rational, then we're agreeing."

Not Dead Yet, based in Forest Park, Ill., criticizes the film and its timing, which coincides with the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. PBS says the timing was coincidental.

Others say biases against the elderly also influence perceptions.

"If someone between the ages of 15 and 22 dies by suicide, our compassion just flows out of us," says Patrick Arbore, director of the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention in San Francisco. "But with older people, as an ageist society, we say, 'Well, they were old anyway.' We all say, 'Gee, this is great, we're going to live longer. But nobody wants to be old.' "

Suicide rates are highest among older white men, experts say.

And as the nation's 79 million baby boomers near retirement age, questions about choices surrounding life and death will become even more pressing.

Shaping the debate

Stern says she hopes her documentary provokes a wider discussion about aging and dying.

"If I can help people be more open and use my family to talk about their own families, that will be helpful," she says. "Where we seem to be headed with aging of the population and the technology keeping people alive is this real division in our society about this feeling that 'My death is something I should control' or 'My death is something that God needs to control.' It's going to be a huge issue."

Experts say suicide, regardless of the reason, often leaves a legacy of pain that can reverberate for generations.

Gregory Yates of San Francisco knows that firsthand. In 1968, when he was a teen, his grandmother, a physician, decided to take her own life when she began losing her vision. She was 70. And although it might have felt to her like the rational thing to do, it wasn't to Yates, now 53.

"It felt like a neutron bomb had fallen inside of me," he says. Not only did he spend years dealing with that pain, but his uncle, his grandmother's son, also took his life. It "left a residue of grief in the family that took years to deal with," Yates says. "It's not a victimless act."

Stern says she and her family accept what her father did. "I think he was sane and not depressed," she says. "I also think it's true he had no tolerance for old age. He didn't want to get old. And he did decide to end his life sooner probably than most people would.

"We don't have a moral judgment about it. What we basically feel is that we loved him and what's entailed in loving him is respecting his autonomy to make that decision and to let him go."